Parental Duties
By Rey
Chapter summary: Merrin gets a wake-up call; mentally, emotionally, culturally.
Warning for: culture-based gender-based segregation and discrimination
Chapter note: "Tre-Fay" here is, well, Fay, and there is a reason why she later dropped the first part of her name.
10. Merrin: The Brothers
Sitting in a communal living space among living people is so bittersweetly familiar. Most of them are powerful in the unseen, too, if not specifically in harvesting the blood of a planet.
But most of them are Brothers, not Sisters, and Merrin can't decide whether this new existence is better than the one she left behind when that toddler Brother called for her to join him.
She was dying slowly but surely from hunger and isolation. She knew it, she knows it, and she will bear that knowledge – also the knowledge that she chose to come here – till the end of her life. Being the sole survivor of a tribe considered heretic and anathema by other tribes on planet, slaughtered nearly to a person because of a reason one has never found out, was hard, to say the least. But this….
Merrin huddles with the only other Nightsister – unmistakable, with the imprint of Dathomir singing in her blood, despite her ignorance of her own origin – by the name of Asajj Ventress by the single, wide, doorless entrance of the big, single-room, lean-to-styled tent erected on stilts supporting a log floor that is their current shelter. Wide-eyed and wary, she does her best to divide her attention between watching the roomful of chattering and murmuring Brothers – none of them are Nightbrothers, at that! – and the bit of tree-fenced clearing outside.
A Sister has just vanished from the clearing altogether, bearing a long rifle and a sash of ammunition, after telling everyone that she was going to patrol the surroundings and get the lay of the land. One other preceded her, almost right after the shelter finished being erected and moved into, claiming that she was going to check and see if there are edible plants and animals nearby. And two other Sisters – one of them is of both genders or neither, actually, but she claimed that one of the cultures she belongs to is matriarchal, so Merrin decides to call her a Sister – are preparing to depart now, one seeking potable water and the other surveying and gathering leaves to act as sleep mats.
All Sisters. And the Brothers just sit around inside, though there's one other Sister, too, there – still very young, and all too impulsive for her own good in this uncertain situation… but would she be sent out instead of the Brothers, if she were older and more competent?
Merrin's hearts burn on that thought.
But the other Nightsister sits as if this were natural.
Asajj even nudges at her flank when she scowls at the clearing outside and below their shelter on hearing one of the Brothers inside laugh hard, enjoying himself it seems.
She transfers the scowl to the possibly deliberately ignorant fellow Nightsister, for that.
"Don't you think it's unnatural for the Sisters to work and the Brothers to just sit around doing nothing?" she demands in a hiss when she sees that Asajj looks more curious than anything.
"Unnatural?" Asajj frowns, baffled. "Eh. It's natural, to me. Fennec is very good with that rifle of hers, I heard. She takes first watch, and her friend Boba will take the second one, if the storm doesn't hit yet. Didn't you listen when we're building this place? And Boba's male, I think. The vocoder's male-voiced, anyhow."
Merrin waves a hand dismissively, still unwilling to drop the matter.
Asajj's frown deepens, but she continues, "T'ra's a neti. They're basically walking, sentient, sapient trees, from what Master Ky told me. So she nows lots of natural things like plants and animals. She might get some of us to help forage and hunt, after she's checked things out, if there's time. I'd personally love to be in the hunt. That's why I'm here. I'll get first dibs on the hunt.
"And Tre-Fay is… I don't know which species, but she seemed like she'd like to have a moment alone among nature. Maybe it's her way to cope. So, in a way, she's doing nothing; just, not here. Gathering materials for sleep mats is a rather cheap excuse, but, well, why not? If she needs the time and space? We can use the mats, she can look round in a different place from T'ra and Fennec and give us more info, and she'd better use the time before the storm hits, anyway."
"And the other one?" Merrin challenges, just a little mollified.
"Tarre?" Asajj shrugs. "Dunno. Didn't ask. Seems just as closed off as the other two. Seems confident about finding potable water, though. Guess their specialty's water-related? Or they'd like to be alone like Tre-Fay. Works with me."
Merrin huffs, frustrated.
"What's your specialty?" Asajj asks before she can speak up, though.
Merrin gives her a long, long look for that. `Is this a retorical question? A trap? A way to mock me or her own heritage?`
She sneers when Asajj returns the look with a glare, unimpressed and hurt.
Well, the sneer doesn't stay long on her lips, for that last emotion she can see on the other Nightsister's face.
It even prompts her to explain, though she feels foolish in having to explain such a life's fact to a Nightsister.
"We tend, we lead, we breed."
Worse, Asajj gawps, as though this were new, and asks, "Is that… a maxim, of where you came from? Of your culture?"
`Your, not our.`
Merrin looks away.
Her hearts burn even fiercer than before.
`She was raised away from home. Not by a nightsister. And whoever raised her never thought of teaching her about us.`
Somehow, now she feels as alone as when she was the only living, sentient being in her graveyard of a home.
No, more alone, truly. Because there are other living, sentient beings here, but not a Nightsister. Not a Nightsister by culture instead of by birth.
And Mother Talzin says that one's birth, one's pedigree, as ordained by the God and Goddess, is everything.
Well, Mother Talzin is dead, now, just like the others, and the only other Nightsister Merrin has found now knows nothing about her own birhthright.
A traitorous thought is worming its way amidst the turmoil, and Merrin lets it churn, grow, shake up everything she has learnt and known and thought of till now, growingly apathetic in her own confusion and hurt and ambivalence.
`Maybe Mother Talzin and the others are wrong not just about this?`
It's why, when T'ra returns – with the carcass of something slung over her shoulder – and reports that the storm will be yet hours away, that there is a nearby herd of herbivores just like this one grazing nearby, that she needs volunteers to hunt and skin and store some to supplement their rations before the storm hits, Asajj is not the only one dashing out to the clearing to join in the hunt.
Merrin joins her, with her spear and knife ready.
She is a good hunter, after all. It's why she was spared the genocide of her entire people, of her entire culture: She was away in a hunt.
Now she is utilising her skills, just like the other Sisters.
And if it helps feed the Brothers as well, not just the Sisters…
…Well, why not?
She will just make sure that they work for what they have been given.
Later.
Probably.
No, most likely.
She is still a Nightsister, after all, with all that she has been raised with, even if she is alone wherever here is.